A R T E .:. V I V A

It is not talked about much these days because it has already become an unexceptional part of daily life, but the popularity of text messaging just goes on and on.

The SMS revolution has opened up an entirely new layer of communication between people with its own codes, language and conventions. It is one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever and all the more remarkable because it was never intended to happen. Mobile phone owners discovered they could utilise a part of the phone reserved for engineers to communicate with each other. The rest is history. Not all texting is benign. In Australia texts were recently used to orchestrate racist meetings and in China, the world's biggest cellphone market, there are reportedly 2,800 surveillance centres to monitor traffic. Overall, though, texting is a force for good, expanding the freedom to do things including cross-generational conversations, dating, voting in game shows, writing poetry, alerting passengers to aircraft delays, launching marketing campaigns or simply adding a little extra to the everyday joys of conversation. Even when the text news is bad, we should not simply blame the messenger.